Ankita Nayak from Kolkata, India, is the youngest member of the ALICE Collaboration. She is currently studying Applied Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering in Techno India, Kolkata and has spent her summer as a summer student at CERN working with the ALICE DAQ group.

Relativistic heavy-ion collisions produce large numbers of particles that do not move individually, but rather as an organized group, with a collective motion known as flow. Flow studies at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) contributed to the surprising realization that the hot and dense matter created in the collisions behaves like a perfect liquid and not as a hadron gas. Now, the ALICE collaboration at the LHC has looked further into how these effects vary for different particle species.

My name is José Manuel Penín Ascariz and I´m studying Physics at the University of Santiago de Compostela. I finished my bachelor degree one month ago and I am planning to start a master degree at the same university in September. My area of interest is QCD and phenomenology. I heard about CERN's summer student programme at my university, when two former summer students gave a talk explaining how amazing the experience has been for them and encouraging us to participate.

My work as a summer student focused on implementing and benchmarking the cluster finding algorithm on GPU using C and CUDA library. GPU is known for its overwhelming number of processing cores. Though those cores are not powerful compared to a typical CPU, due to the large number used the task can be broken down into small pieces and processed concurrently. The performance gain is distinctively high in various kinds of task such as matrix manipulation.

Hi, I am Brian Thorsbro and I am a summer student at CERN year 2014. I work at the Alice experiment and my work involves Monte Carlo simulations of particle collisions. Most Monte Carlo generators export the generated data to the format called HepMC and my task is to make this format usable in the ALICE simulation and reconstruction framework.

I am Gde Bimananda Mahardika Wisna, an undergraduate student of Engineering Physics at Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia. My dream of visiting CERN dates back to April 2013. One of my colleagues was accepted at CERN’s Summer Student Programme 2013 and I thought that I could also have this experience in 2014! I decided to apply for CERN’s Summer Students Programme and imagined myself working at CERN. In April 2014 I received the acceptance letter and that's when my dream started becoming true.

Just imagine how it feels l to be involved in one of the world’s most prestigious projects like the ALICE experiment at CERN. Isn't it wonderful? This summer I am part of the ALICE collaboration at CERN, and I had the greatest and most challenging summer ever in my life, working with people from all over the world.

I first heard about CERN’s summer school from my university supervisor who has been to CERN as a summer student; like most of the professors of particle physics in my department. He said that it has been a great experience and gives the opportunity to attend lectures given by scientists who are all experts in their fields. Moreover, he pointed out the fact that one can always meet and interact with various people who work at CERN no matter which are their status and even if they have different research interests.

Thinking of proposing to the one that you love? How do you pick the best location to create a truly memorable moment? Just once in your life you'd like to feel like the hero in a chick flick, with all the schmaltzy romance, the elaborate plots, the happy endings.

Even if it's just for the amount of time it takes to say those big four words: Will. You. Marry. Me. You want it to be somewhere exotic: in a romantic setting, away from family and friends, on a place never to forget.

I first heard about CERN's summer students programme when some students from my home university participated in this programme and told me that it would be a good experience for me. After a few discussions with them and my professors I decided to apply for a summer in the Mecca of modern physics.

My bachelor degree was devoted to modeling electromagnetic shower in calorimeter PHOS using Geant4 package while my master thesis was about analyzing data from ALICE experiment.